OMG - It's raining raw fish in tasty little packages

Fast fishy food chain YO Sushi! plans to buy servers no more as it heads into the cloud, according to IT manager Billy Waters.

A much needed infrastructure refresh was looming for the firm which carves up raw fish and serves it on conveyer belts for punters, as it was using Microsoft Exchange, Office and other apps on seven year-old servers.

"The servers were reaching the end of their useful life and replacing them and upgrading our core office software would require substantial investment," says Waters.

Three options were on the table - upgrade on-premise kit, moved to a hosted model or buy into the cloud. It opted for the latter, migrating its entire infrastructure to Microsoft's occasionally criticised Office 365 suite.

Waters reckons the cloud move will save YO Sushi! 40 per cent over a five-year period and insists it's "future proof".

"If we went the traditional route, we would have to do the same thing again in 5 years time. This way, we never have to buy a server again," he said.

BPOS and Office 365 have been beset with outages, and although the 99.9 per cent uptime promised by Microsoft has a financially backed SLA, it does not restore lost productivity. ®